Last year, Adrian Twarog sold his AI business, Enhance.AI in just 30 days after launching it. In this article, he shares the behind-the-scenes details of exactly how he got to the point of selling the business. And the lessons he learned along the way.
After making the sale Adrian shared a video explaining exactly how was able to build the AI SaaS business in just a month, and how he started making sales by getting an actual audience and paying subscribers. Then, lastly, he explains why he chose to put it on the market, how he sold it, and his entire experience after selling the business.
We shall leave this article in his own words so that you can grasp every little detail of his experience. Let's get started.
The Challenge
Last year, I wanted to do something insane, a monumental task. To build up an entire business in just a month! This was something that I've always wanted to do. I've created lots of businesses and SaaS projects, and some have taken me years, and some have taken me months, but the end result was always a failure, which is unfortunate. But I think this is one of the important things to do: move fast and change fast. So, in this case, I wanted to see if I could do the whole thing in 30 days.
Project Idea
My goal was to build up something using AI. I had just heard about Elon Musk and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, something that he founded, and it was an autocomplete text generator. I wanted to see if I could use this for coding, and this is where the idea of Enhanced AI came about.
The first step was to see if it was actually possible to do what I wanted, and the second step was to see if there were some competitors in the space that were already doing this, and I was lucky on both fronts.
In terms of the coding space, creating maybe a short code inside of WordPress using AI was something that was never possible before, or even just understanding regex. These were two things that I really wanted to be able to do with the AI tool that I wanted to create. The second part was having a look if they could be done in OpenAI, and when I tried them out, they actually kind of worked. I had to tweak them a little bit, but I got them to work, which means that there was merit in my idea. It was now time to build it.
Coding Phase
Being a full-stack developer meant that I could create this entire thing myself, and it's one of the benefits that a lot of coders don't realize. I think that it's one of the skills I'm most proud to have these days.
So what I decided to do was jump in, create the front end on React, the back end on Node.js, integrate the payment system on Stripe, as well as a database on MongoDB, put the whole thing together to talk to OpenAI and its API layer, and then I had a working product.
But it wasn't that easy. I did spend hours upon hours daily over those 30 days to be able to achieve this, and this I found out was actually the easy part and the fun part of the whole process. The hard part was in the next phase: customer acquisition. This meant that I needed to have other people see what I saw in this product, and this wouldn't be easy.
Customer Acquisition
There are normally a lot of things that people do around marketing and advertising to be able to get a product out there, but I didn't want to spend too much money on this. I wanted it to be very organic. So what I decided to do was a YouTube video where I showcased the whole process of me building it (which you can check out here), but what ended up happening was that video took off, and a lot of people got to see the product, how I built it, and how it worked, and it resonated with them.
So I got thousands of sign-ups immediately just as a consequence of creating that one video. Most of the sign-ups were from software developers like me.
Now that I had a business, a SaaS, with thousands of customers signed up for the free trial, I wanted to convert them to active customers. So I continued to focus on my features. I built out my best feature yet: it was a blogging feature that allowed people to predict their blog content as they write it, sort of like in Gmail auto-predict but entire sentences and paragraphs. This was the most successful feature so far. I was using it myself on a daily basis, and I got lots of great feedback on it.
This helped me basically convert a lot of customers to using the product and started to make it a success. The only problem was that not a lot of developers blog often, and maybe I was actually focusing on the wrong audience. This is the next hurdle that I came across.
I felt like I was investing more and more time into this blogging aspect of Enhance AI, but I wasn't getting additional sign-ups to really justify all the time I was committing. I decided to give my friend Simon Hoiberg a call to find out what he had to say about this:
"Well, Enhance AI works really well as a writing assistant. Maybe bloggers are just a better fit. Why don't you sell it? Use marketplaces like Acquire and sell it to a blogging company?"
The Process of Selling the Business
Selling it was something I had not considered before. Originally, when I built it, I was so excited I thought it'd be a side hustle with passive income. But as I kept putting more and more effort into it and getting no results, it felt demoralizing. So, I decided to give it a try. Acquire is a site that allows you to sell any business.
Luckily, I had built this business properly from the ground up. It included a proper Australian registration with a business with a proper trading name, a proper domain, and lots more. As part of this process, I had to also kind of evaluate what the net worth of my business was. This was a very difficult task, but I originally came up with a figure of $30 000.
My original thinking was that I put about a month into this so far, which meant about 30 days working at about seven and a half hours per day at a price of about $150 an hour. That comes to about $30 000. On top of that, I felt like if I continued to put effort into this business, I could get enough customers signed up to make at least $30 000 per year. It felt like a solid number to me, so that's what I listed it as.
Now, let's get back to how selling my SaaS went, and this is the surprising part where Simon was right. I got lots and lots of interest. I almost had daily messages about people seeking to test down my product to see if it was worth buying. I went through a lot of conversations; some of them went to the final step where people were almost ready to give me an offer, some of them didn't go anywhere at all, but eventually, I got a bid. A bid that was really interested in my product.
They were already a blogging company, and they could see how this tool could really help them improve what they were already doing. I showcased their product to them, and I did some video calls with them, and they were just astonished. They were so impressed that they were going to give me an offer on the table, but we needed to go through some negotiations.
So, I mentioned that I wanted to sell this business for $30 000. It had already made me about $5 000 dollars from the early subscriptions. After that, the revenue declined drastically, but those figures were going down because not many developers were focused on the blogging tool. This was one of the reasons I was selling it, but unfortunately, this also made my offer a little bit unappealing.
They negotiated me down to $20 000 as a sales price. At this stage, I didn't really want to go through additional offers. I had already been doing this for about a month, and while I could probably get a better price if I had been more patient and more resilient, one of the things I did was just cave in and accept the price, so I sold it.
But there's more to this story; there are also terms and conditions. It meant that I'm not able to build the exact same product in the exact same space in the future, and this makes sense. You don't want someone to immediately sell a business and sell the same one to a competitor, so I think that's fair.
On top of that, I mentioned that I was able to make $30 000 from this product, and we're not quite there yet. I made $20 000 from the sale of the product and $5 000 in subscriptions from the customers. There's still $5 000 missing, and this is where I made some money from both AdSense for publishing the video on Youtube, as well as the video sponsor which was MongoDB at the time, as part of doing that video. And that brought up the total to $30 000.
So, for a month's worth of work, I think that's a solid amount. I'm quite proud of it as well.
Summary
Adrian Twarog was able to build and sell his AI SaaS Website in just 30 days. He made around $30 000 from it and he believes that it was a satisfactory sale based on the work he put in. Adrian’s website Enhance.AI has been rebranded and changed a little bit by the new owners who now call it Copymatic.AI.
If you want to learn more about Adrian and his SaaS development endeavors, you can check out his social media profile where he makes frequent updates.
